Verizon outage disrupts voice, text and data across the US

Thousands of Verizon customers across the United States experienced widespread disruptions to voice, text and mobile data service over the weekend as phones across major metropolitan areas showed "SOS" or "No Service" messages, leaving some users unable to make routine calls or complete two factor authentications. The outage, which outage-tracking sites logged beginning midmorning on Saturday and peaking in the afternoon, affected users in cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Miami, Philadelphia and Dallas.

Verizon said in a statement that a software issue was impacting wireless service for some customers and that engineers were working to identify and resolve the problem. Late Saturday the company posted that it was beginning to see service restoration in impacted areas and that teams continued to work to restore remaining customers. Officials did not provide a firm timeline for full recovery.

Estimates of the scale varied. Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker, showed reports climbing through the afternoon, with several snapshots indicating more than 10,000 complaints by early afternoon and reports peaking near 23,000 later in the day. One...